In 2014, according to a Wisconsin federal court, three hundred thousand registered voters in that state lacked the forms of identification that Republican legislators deemed necessary to cast their ballots.

Neil Albrecht, the executive director of Milwaukee’s Election Commission, believes the policy depressed turnout in the blue counties Clinton desperately needed to carry Wisconsin. Statewide, turnout was the lowest it has been for a presidential election in two decades. Stein’s demands for a recount reflect the same narcissism as her candidacy, whose primary function was to help Trump win.

In the words of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which, before the election, struck down some of the changes instituted by North Carolina, “Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist.” Likewise, a federal court in Wisconsin rejected some of the changes in voting rules there, but federal courts can’t police every aspect of voting rights. Republican Jay Ashcroft, the son of George W. Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft, will take over as Missouri’s Secretary of State, and has promised to strictly enforce the voter ID requirement. That law also included one of the nation’s strictest voter ID requirements.

Compared to 2012, 60,000 fewer people voted in this year Milwaukee — the county that holds the vast majority of the state’s black population. Trump won the state by fewer than 200,000 votes, and the governor’s race remains too close to call. Students of political despair (a popular field these days) might consider the case of Robert Parris Moses. (He tweeted recently, and falsely, that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”) Eric Holder, who did much to protect voting rights as Attorney General, will be joined by President Obama in a project to preserve Democratic and minority power in the legislative redistricting that will follow the 2020 census—a valuable project, if a daunting one.

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Missouri, for example, voted last week to enshrine a voter ID law in its state constitution. Their systematic disenfranchisement was intentional and politically motivated. The election was also marked by low turnout, with tens of millions of eligible voters choosing not to participate at all. This drew a curiously passive response from the Obama Administration, but there remains no evidence that Russia or any other outside force systematically intervened or altered the result in any state. According to new data released by the state, nearly 600 ballots will be thrown away because voters did not have the right ID. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.

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More important, they have turned attention away from the real voting-rights scandal of 2016. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a substantial margin—more than two and a half million votes—but, under the baleful metrics of our Electoral College, the outcome was not especially close. By: Sarah Cowgill August 23, 2020 Articles, Election 2020, Ignored by MSM, Politics. A new Harvard study found that such long waits not only disenfranchise working-class voters who can’t afford to wait, but also discourages voters from participating in future elections. Would-be Green Party voters in Montana shut out by nervous Democrats . In Texas, a gun permit works; student identification does not.) Voting advocates claimed that even that number did not go far enough, given the long backlog of applications. The state has no automatic process for former felons to regain their voting rights. Now she has exploited legitimate questions about interference by Russia, which, it seems, organized or backed a hacking operation that involved the theft of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. Tampa resident Rodney Johnson Sr. lost his voting rights in 2002 after a drug conviction, and he has been petitioning Gov. “We would like to speak for ourselves. likes some forms of I.D. Several Republican-controlled states took the Court’s decision as an invitation to rewrite their election laws, purportedly to address the (nonexistent) problem of voter fraud but in fact to limit the opportunities for Democrats and minorities (overlapping groups, of course) to cast their ballots.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Your California Privacy Rights. Wisconsin’s is under way, although lawyers supporting Trump are trying to stop the effort in all three states. A recent Brennan Center study found that almost 16 million voters were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016, and that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination — which are no longer subject to preclearance after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act — had significantly higher purge rates.

Trump will assume the presidency because of the Electoral College’s influence — though nearly three million more people cast ballots for Hillary Clinton.

Information about your device and internet connection, including your IP address, Browsing and search activity while using Verizon Media websites and apps. In total, roughly 1.5 million Florida residents (almost 2.5 percent of the state’s population) are disenfranchised because of the law, which white lawmakers designed in the years after the Civil War in a deliberate attempt to dilute the voting power of freed slaves. The challenge of reversing these initiatives is formidable, not least because the President-elect also apparently believes in the myth of widespread voter fraud.

better than others. Still, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, has launched a successful fund-raising drive, collecting almost seven million dollars from grieving Americans, to underwrite official recounts. But the Shelby County case, and the backlash it both reflected and accelerated, reminds us that the struggle for the right to vote, and the need to follow Moses, may never end. (The G.O.P. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Your Privacy Controls. Yet there has been relatively little discussion about the millions of people who were eligible to vote but could not do so because they faced an array of newly-enacted barriers to the ballot box. Find out more about how we use your information in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. What makes the current controversy so dispiriting is the sense that the issue should have been settled by now. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. A A A; by Sarah Cowgill. Read More. Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes, Wisconsin by 22,177, and Pennsylvania by 70,638. The North Carolina Republican Party actually sent out a press release boasting about how its efforts drove down African-American turnout in this election. The number of in-person voters on the first Thursday and Friday was 21,560 in 2012, but was only 3,305 in 2016, a decrease of 18,255 or 85 percent.

A GOP memo issued at the end of the state’s early voting period celebrated the inevitable results of those cutbacks: African American turnout had dropped nearly nine percent. Read More. Republicans were wildly successful at suppressing voters in 2016 Three GOP-controlled states demonstrate the effectiveness of disenfranchising the opposition. Instead, people have to travel to the state capital and proactively request that the governor grant them clemency on an individual basis. In his first term as governor, fewer than 1,600 people have had their rights restored.

In the final weeks leading up to the election, voting rights groups discovered that Wisconsin officials at local DMV offices were giving false information to voters attempting to get the proper ID, putting those officials in violation of a federal court order. Moses understood that the franchise is the foundation of democracy, and, more than half a century later, that right is again under threat, often in the same places (mostly in the South) and always for the same reason (so that those in power can stay there).

As many as 17 million voters were purged from the rolls between 2016 and 2018, many of them in states with a long history of voter discrimination. According to the state’s own records, ten times that many eligible voters in the state — as many as 300,000 people — lacked the proper ID and may have been disenfranchised. Three such states serve as case studies for the effectiveness of these voting restrictions: Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Florida. Latinos Secured a Trump Win in Florida. At the time, fewer than seven per cent of eligible African-Americans in the state were registered. He told ThinkProgress shortly before Election Day how hard it is for former felons to live in a state that doesn’t let them vote. Federal courts struck down most of the law after finding that it was passed with the intention to suppress African-American voters “with almost surgical precision.” The court noted that the lawmakers first studied which racial demographics used which voting methods, and then moved to eliminate those favored by black residents. Though some of the most extreme cuts were blocked by the state board of elections, many remained in place through the election. All rights reserved. Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy. The recounts will only give Trump an opportunity to claim victory again. Florida is one of just three states that permanently disenfranchise anyone with a felony conviction.

He was beaten repeatedly, once nearly to death. To put it another way, Clinton received forty-three thousand fewer votes in that county than Barack Obama did—a number that is nearly double Trump’s margin of victory in all of Wisconsin.

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The law was a perfect example, the judge wrote, of “the inevitable tendency of elected officials to entrench themselves by targeting groups unlikely to vote for them.”. It’s difficult to count uncast votes, but there were clearly thousands of them as a result of the voter-suppression measures.

They make it so difficult for you to even try to have a second chance at life.”. All three implemented voting restrictions that affect millions of people.

Mother Jones magazine has published an investigation of the 2016 election in Wisconsin — won by Donald Trump in the state by just 23,000 votes — and found that “voter suppression,” in the form of the state’s voter ID law, had a significant role in Trump’s victory. In counties that slashed early voting hours and sites, voters also had to wait in lines several hours long to cast their ballots. No longer able to cut a full week of early voting, the state GOP instructed the boards to make “party line changes to early voting”: cutting hours and locations. Where found, such voter suppression efforts vary by state, local government, precinct, and election. Scott for clemency for years.

Democrats Caught in Voter Suppression Scheme. In one of the many trials concerning the law, former government officials testified that behind closed doors, Republicans pushing for the voter ID were “politically frothing at the mouth” over the prospect that it would make it more difficult for people to cast ballots for Democrats.